The Invisible Armada

By Alain Brossat
The Sonderweg of Taiwan must be considered from the point of view of the Chinese Revolution. This Sonderweg is itself entirely included, enveloped in the vagaries of this revolution, it is, under the status of exception, one of its facets or one of its chapters. We must start from the idea that the Chinese Revolution is a universal, in the sense that, through it and through it alone, the Chinese peasant accesses the human condition, just as the Russian Revolution had made the proletarian a universal subject of modern History. Conversely, the Chinese Revolution is a universal in the sense that it abolishes the time of landlords and warlords, improperly defined as "feudalism" by Marxists...

By Alain Brossat
The separatist escalation of the current Taiwanese leaders converges with the marked shift of the Western powers and their allies and subordinates in the region, which now designate China as an adversary and systemic competitor, and against which they are lining up in battle order...

By Alain Brossat
...trafficking in false intellectual (conceptual) currency that Taiwanese independence leaders are engaging in today around the signifier "sovereignty" must be firmly fought. Counterfeiting is here not put at the service of the emancipation of the people but on the contrary of their subordination – Taiwan is less and less a sovereign entity and more and more openly a protectorate of the United States, with the aggravating circumstance that this situation, this real status of the island does not arise from a coup de force or a fait accompli imposed by an invader or a powerful neighbor but rather from the will of the governing elites. The aspiration to sovereignty does not inspire those who, day after day, huddle more tightly under the umbrella deployed above their heads by their powerful protector....

By Alain Brossat

What makes today's world particularly dangerous is that the dividing line between war and peace has become blurred. We have entered the age of hybrid wars, the antipodes of that where sovereignties, states declared war on each other, agreed to declare themselves in a state of war and waited until they had done so before triggering hostilities. From now on, the major conflicts shaking the planet are placed under the sign of hybrid warfare....

By Alain Brossat

The transplant of Western democracy hardly took place until the last decades of the 20th century in Latin America, due in particular to the constant and brutal interference of the United States inclined to support military regimes and dictatorships under their control, it did not take not in sub-Saharan Africa where the conditions imposed by chaotic decolonization prevail, it did not take hold in South-East Asia where, once again, the fight against international communism leads the United States and the Western powers to support the most corrupt regimes (Philippines), the most authoritarian (Thailand, Burma), the bloodiest (Indonesia), without forgetting their puppets in South Vietnam during the Second Indochina War....

By Alain Brossat

The decisive point here is the unusual and intrinsically paradoxical turn of this figure of "democratization": it does not result, in the countries concerned, from the sequence of a foundation or re-foundation of a democratic regime on a popular movement of emancipation, on a resistance or an uprising, on a shared aspiration for democracy understood as a regime of freedom, but on the contrary on a defeat, an alignment, a bringing into line imposed by a foreign power – therefore on a process at the heart of which the figure of submission and heteronomy is established...

By Alain Brossat

It is not for nothing that the white unconscious of Western democracy is regaining momentum in an era marked by the rise in power of China – in reaction to this phenomenon which determines the very form the age (époque)  we are living in. As in the configuration of obsessive neurosis, this unconscious has come today to exercise a real tyranny over speeches relating to China or, more precisely, to the Chinese threat – China only exists, according to the new discursive rules, as danger, threat, bad object.

By Alain Brossat

The discursive machine of the Universal revived by human rights has a short breath: Human Rights and the rhetoric that goes with them have been monopolized by the States and the elites of the Global North who have made it a war machine against their enemies. ... Abstract, floating universalism is not the element in which practical resistance to concrete situations or conditions of inequity can take root. This is the reason why, in their best use, Human Rights are put forward in the fight against abuse of power, state violence, discrimination – in a manner defensive; in the horizon of immunity, and not that of emancipation.

布洛薩著・韓旻奇譯

搞工業製恐怖的國家極少被當成「恐佈份子」國家。最重要的理由有兩個：一方面，和工業製恐怖有關、甚至有份搞的人霸住了主流論述，另一方面，全球觀眾、西方輿論很難抽身出來，客觀看待這種處死大量人（多數是平民）的行政安排。我們被發展極快的現代生活方式包圍，習慣生活都是行政安排，就很難仔細斟酌，指稱那是犯罪...

布洛薩著・韓旻奇譯

我覺得現在所有條件都齊全，只要爆發一次地區衝突（怎樣爆發當然未定），就可以令目前的主要勢力，如中國、俄羅斯、美國、美國西方盟友、其他國家，全面對戰起來。現況和1914年八月賽拉耶佛襲擊前的歐洲相似得可怕，克拉克的書讀起來就特別發人深省了。...

By Alain Brossat

In truth, the Jews only became, in Western discursivity as in the strategic calculations of hegemony, completely white , that is to say full members of the white species, in the era when the power of Israel as a state asserted itself, in the Middle East and, more generally, in international relations...

By Juan Alberto Ruis Casado

The real “invisible” problem is the West’s incapacity to accept the end of white men’s world dominance. While the West enjoyed a position of dominance and the perks that came with it, we could maintain the facade of democracy’s supremacy and how wonderful free trade was....

By Juan Alberto Ruis Casado

The root of the problem is the rentist economy...Reliance on property rentals creates precarious labour conditions, where wages fail to keep up with housing costs. This situation traps workers in a cycle of working merely to pay the bills (i.e., modern slavery)

張文星 主筆 

在 1975 年《规训与惩罚》出版之际......福柯再次谈到了“工具箱”，他说如果他的每本书都是一个“小工具箱”，人们可以随意从中提取某些句子、某些想法、某些分析，就像取用螺丝刀或扳手一样。话锋一转，他鼓励人们批判性地使用这些工具——“用来短路、破坏或摧毁权力系统，包括那些我的书里构建的系统，如果偶尔这些工具被用来对付我自己，那也是再好不过了”...

By Eyal Sivan, Carole Lo 羅惠珍, Hanh T. L. Nguyen 

In the past, Israel built a wall. We can still see a high cement wall separating Gaza and Israel. Later, wall creepers and other plants planted along the wall covered the wall, as if the wall no longer exists. This is to deny the existence of Gaza. We held a concert near Gaza, and young people listened to the concert without any worries, and were very happy, because for them, Gaza did not exist. Hence, October 7th. The Hamas attack has torn apart the Israelis’ dream of denial, which makes people crazy...

By Alain Brossat

“Terrorism” is a scareword intended to scare the sparrows – and the sparrows are us, supposedly. The ordinary people. Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say here: pigeons, rather than sparrows1. “Terrorism” is one of those words that saturate the language of the masters, when they evoke what resists their influence, a term of hegemonic storytelling , a key language element aimed at disparaging any kind of uprising from below....

By Jon Solomon

...what is poorly understood, if not actively mystified, is the nature of the “democracy” evolving in Taiwan under full digital conditions. A certain number of seemingly marginal facts related to the role of digital culture in this electoral cycle signal an intensification of the apparatus of weaponized population management for which the digital has become the primary vehicle...

布洛薩著　陳韋勳譯

這麼一本無比雄心壯志的書，自詡為真知灼見的未來預言，但在出版後的幾十年裡，它的一些預測被現實斷然否決了──當然，我在這裡談的是哈特（Michael Hardt）和奈格里（Antonio Negri）的《帝國》（Empire, 2000）一書......直截了當地說，在我看來，無論是從歐洲的角度（烏克蘭和俄羅斯之間的戰爭）還是從東亞的角度來看（圍繞臺灣問題不斷加劇的緊張局勢），我們可以說，哈特和奈格里的主張已經明顯與現況分歧：我們的當下就是帝國定義本身......

By Alain Brossat

It is a topos that is so ubiquitous in so many  westerns of all brands, eras and styles, and which gives rise to infinite variations: white people, as a pioneer and conquering species (in the West and the South of the United States in formation) appear, at the beginning of history, in the greatest of states of division...

By Hanh T. L. Nguyen

It is no secret that the Vietnamese used to be dehumanized in American narratives during and in the aftermath of the Vietnam war. Now, Palestinians are being called “human animals” by Israelis. One would expect that the media in Vietnam – a country and a people that, for a long time, were demonized and dehumanized by American and Western rhetoric – would try to do justice to the representation of Palestinians in its media. However, a glance at Vietnam’s top online newspapers unveils a troubling reality: they uncritically echo mainstream Western media, bolstering Israeli and American narratives on the war in Gaza.

By Rada Iveković

The universalisation of a nationalist paradigm, as in France, is only its over-inflation and provincializing. Everything else is rendered illegitimate, invisible and erased from mainstream and consensus. With regard to women, the "deep state" remains what it has been throughout different socio-economic formations, allowing the maintenance of patriarchy by its adaptations throughout the changes of regime and of economic formations...

By Rada Iveković

In this paper, i see the gender and cold war dichotomies as part of the same complex system of binaries that govern hegemony and domination, and produce war. Since, at a young age, i realized the discomfort and oddity of being born a girl, i have been trying to circumvent the gender binarity sealed in language, and preferred a fluid gender to the masculine and feminine, fixed ones...

By Alain Brossat

If cinema is a factory, which it certainly is, it is also a factory of dissensus with the present, an inexhaustible source of thinking differently. In other words, it gives rise to other spaces just as it nourishes the formidable principle of identity. If cinema perpetually takes us on board, it never does so in an unequivocal way. Far from being, as Kracauer says, only the "mirror of existing society", a flat definition par excellence, cinema is, in a perpetually minor but constantly renewed mode, a means for us to ensure our grip on the present while differing from what exists...

By Alain Brossat

Adorno's radical cultural pessimism, with its long shadow, a political neo-conservatism strangely drawn from the sources of Marx's critique of alienation and the Weberian theory of instrumental rationality, leads to an approach that is not only declinist, but openly catastrophist of the questions of art and culture in the age of “neo-capitalism”.....

By Juan Alberto Ruis Casado

Officials in the United States and its European allies have refused to even confirm that Israel is violating international law in its indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population in Gaza. On the other hand, the narrative that China had committed nothing less than genocide in Xinjiang – where nothing matching the severity of the Israeli attacks on Gaza has happened – persists in the official statements of those same governments....

布洛薩著，韓旻奇譯

台灣是中國主權的事，依照國際法，今天實際存在的台灣主權體完全站不住腳，這是中國大陸領袖的綱領。其中一個主要反對論點是「台灣從來也不是中華人民共和國一部分」。

反對大陸綱領的人認為台灣從來沒有納入中國共產黨主權範圍，法理就足以裁定台灣實體（這個島、這片領土），大陸主權絕對不可能追討。這樣推論，就假設了權利問題（有沒有權追討主權）和政權問題（中國共產黨打敗國民黨後建立的政權）分不開...

By Alain Brossat

We can, from the point of view of a general analysis of violence, distinguish two forms of terror in the contemporary world: industrial terror and artisanal terror...The means par excellence of the first is aerial bombardment ... An armed force equipped with this equipment has the ability to carry out raids on both military and civilian objectives, aimed at either selective destruction or mass destruction. ...Artisanal terror, on the other hand, is exercised, so to speak, on a human scale. It remains inscribed in the tradition of traditional forms of violence. If it spontaneously inspires horror to highly pacified or "deviolent" subjects such as the people of the global North...

布洛薩著，韓旻奇譯

中國國族主義政黨國民黨內戰大敗，退守台灣，在島上任意妄為，原本希望靠武力重奪大陸，最遲在六十年代也完全放棄了。但是，把共產「賊、匪、罪犯、叛徒」趕走（蔣介石和其繼承人不停用這些稱呼），重奪大陸的宗旨一直有效，要等到李登輝當選（他是國民黨人，但支持民主轉型，消除威權政制痕跡），一九九一年四月三十號宣告「我們不會再用武力統一中國」才告終。 ...

By Souhail Chichah

The current militarized attacks carried by Hamas represent the pivotal framework within which the “Western” world currently perceives the Israeli-Palestinian question ...

By Juan Alberto Ruiz Casado

The aim of this lecture is to examine how these fundamental concepts relate to a specific case: their impact on our perception of China as an external “enemy” and how they contribute to shaping this perception through communication ...

By Alain Brossat

My minority destiny is, I am convinced, now that I have most of my life behind me, inseparable from my left-handed situation . For people of my generation, being in the minority as a left-hander was not quite an almost normal and banal, to be sure, situation - as it is supposed to be today ...

By Nguyen Thi Lan Hanh

Initially intended as a light-hearted documentary about the process of a girl growing up, Children of the Mist ultimately evolves into a compelling story of Di and her family’s struggle and negotiation with the event of Di being kidnapped to be a bride. ...

By Joachim Daniel Dupuis

Applied to cinema, the concept of minority opens the way to ... a story out of time (in french : «une histoire intempestive»), that of the “becomings” that snatch films from the domination of the studios, from their law and their storytelling...

By Manki Hon

One of the terms we often use in a conversation about Hong Kong is Hong Konger. In this presentation, I try to draw three functions of this identity which is part of an apparatus of what I will call identityism... 

By Alain Brossat

What makes Taiwan a marked singularity in the general picture of political and state entities making up the world today is essentially due to two things: on the one hand, the non-coincidence of sovereignty and independence; on the other, the uncertainty as to the form of the nation-state... 

By Weisyun Chen

"La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu" (translated as "Tiger at the Gates" or "The Trojan War Will Not Take Place") is a play written by the French playwright and diplomat Jean Giraudoux. It was first published in 1935 and premiered on March 22, 1937, at the Théâtre de l'Athénée in Paris... 

By Alain Brossat

Of all the fantasies produced by the imagination of the reconstructors of Taiwan's past, one of the most entertaining is undoubtedly this: the island as part and parcel, since time immemorial, of a spectral "Austronesian Empire" extending from Southeast Asia to Madagascar, including the vast maritime expanses of the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean, with their innumerable and diverse island and archipelagic populations... The metamorphosis of the notion of cultural area, understood here in its broadest sense, the most vague and foreign to any condition of historicity, in that of empire has, in this fable, a distinct vocation: to erase on the magic slate of History all that which, in a solid, massive and tangible way, links the past as well as the present of Taiwan to the Chinese world... 

By Alain Brossat

I can't see in the future, so I can't tell you if there will be a war between China and the US plus their followers. Besides, it's a too serious matter for playing guessing game. For this reason, the only thing I can do, in my position as a philosopher focused on the ontology of the present, is to draw your attention on a few methodological and analytical issues related to the subject... 

By Alain Brossat

In the history of political cartooning, as it appeared in France from the 17th century onwards, then experienced a fantastic boom during the French Revolution and throughout the 19th century, a fragile and shifting dividing line, but nonetheless decisive, separates two orientations: one, primordial, one would almost say, draws its inspiration from satire whose constant register is the mockery of those above (the masters, the powerful, the rulers) by those from below, those who embody the popular spirit... 

By Alain Brossat

I would like to begin by drawing your attention to the great variability of the vocabulary that I will use for this presentation, terms such as ethnicity, race, tribe, nation, people. This, of course, in European languages, it's up to you to see if what I say retains its relevance when you switch to Chinese. Until the Second World War, in France, the French were still quite commonly spoken of as a “race”, a use which, today, would immediately raise a storm; "tribe", despite all its ethnographic alibis, was interminably a notion belonging to the colonial vocabulary of the white powers, intended to designate the supposedly natural mode of organization of the colonized as uncivilized... 

By Alain Brossat

At the end of last October, five former European foreign ministers signed a column in Le Monde arguing that the policy practiced by the State of Israel in the occupied territories fell within the notion of "crime of apartheid". . Among them, Hubert Védrine, better inspired on this subject than on the Ruandan genocide . Already in February of this year, Amnesty International had joined other international humanitarian organizations (including Human Rights Watch) or Israeli organizations (B'Tselem) in affirming, likewise, that the segregationist and supremacist policy practiced by the Jewish State towards the Palestinians, in Israel as in the occupied territories, fell well within the notion of apartheid... 

阿蘭．布洛薩

　一如傅柯所強調，烏托邦跟異托邦不只是「不一樣」，而是特別在這一點形成對比：烏托邦是想像的果實，它沒有真正的、可抵達的地點；相反地，異托邦真實存在，它是一個能被命名、被造訪、被居住其中的空間或是地點。（布洛薩）

　　布洛薩在本書中追尋異托邦而開啟的批判旅程，確實有著鮮明立場，具現於：芒通墓園；盧梭《孤獨漫步者的遐想》在被逐離人類共同體後，萌生的「與自我的共同體」（落腳於聖皮耶島）；二戰太平洋戰役電影中以敘事想像力創造的小島異托邦；針對臺灣（又一座島嶼）宜居性災難的反思，以及串接異托邦、共同體和生命之所在的可能出路。（王志弘）

By Alain Brossat

That an infinitely ambitious book, claiming to be prophetic and visionary, sees some of its predictions flatly denied over the decades following its publication - I am talking here, of course, of Hardt and Negri's Empire - that does not bother me particularly and that does not seem to me a sufficient reason to throw away this work. What I expect in the first place from a book of this kind is that it makes me think... 

By Alain Brossat

Sinophobia is obviously a term that can have infinitely variable meanings, depending on the contexts in which it is used, both in spatial and temporal terms. It is, on the other hand, in its very scholarly structure (Latin and Greek, like genocide – well, well...), a recent term – Western languages and discourses have never lacked, I have just said, of terms and expressions intended to condense and designate negatively all that can be associated with the signifiers "China", "Chinese"...

By Alain Brossat

At the rate things are going with regard to the mental drift of the continents in Taiwan, there will soon no longer be a Taiwan Strait, but an island floating freely in the vast maritime expanses of the Pacific, ever more emancipated from terrestrial and human geography, ever further from the Chinese continent... 

By Maurizio Lazzarato

The slogans “No War,” “Peace Now,” “Not With Putin, Not With Biden” seem weak and powerless until they find strength in an “Against Putin and Against Biden.” Opposition to war must be rooted in a relentless struggle against the different forms of capitalism and sovereignty that are fighting each other to divide the “global market” and that have been mobilized to organize domination, exploitation, and war... 

By Alain Brossat

It is quite risky to talk about the island in general or, if you will, to make the island not just a place, but a concept. It is because there is such a great diversity of islands that it seems that we can only take note of their diversity: small and large, tiny islets and islands which form continents or almost, deserted islands and others densely populated, islands on which very advanced material civilizations thrive and others where populations dedicated to wild life prosper or wither – the paradise of anthropologists... 

An interview with Alain Brossat

Q: There is a lot of talk at the moment about Taiwan, in the French press, about the threats of an imminent Chinese invasion...

A: It has indeed become a haunting motif in mainstream "narratives" both on the island and in Cold War propaganda in the Global North - " the China's threat" or Chinese threat, in its original version... 

By Alain Brossat

The motif of tradition is to be handled like dynamite, because of its very ambivalence. In any case, it is not true that any reference to a tradition is by nature conservative or reactionary. When Walter Benjamin refers to the history of the oppressed and the tradition of the vanquished, it is all one and the horizon of his thought (of his messianism) is emancipation. A revolutionary thought is hardly conceivable in the absence of a reference to a tradition, which is neither an attic nor an antique store...

By Alain Brossat and Alain Naze

In the fascist or totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, surveillance, denunciation, terror are the elements that distinctly oppose freedom in its most elementary classical sense – Orwell does not stop drawing treats on this motif in his two dystopian novels – Animal farm and 1984. In democratic societies doped with the latest in computer and digital technologies, freedom finds its harmonious complement in the equipment of individual subjects with prostheses which they perceive first and foremost as means of increasing their performance and increasing their possibilities of life...

By Alain Brossat and Alain Naze

In Chapter 11 of The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The Totalitarian Movement,” Hannah Arendt constantly puts forward the motive of flight from reality [1]. The characteristic of totalitarian movements and what sets them apart from authoritarian movements is their propensity to escape from reality, to produce a fictitious reality, to alienate the masses from the real world, to make a functional or operative reality (“functioning reality”) prevail, to create, through propaganda, the conditions under which lies replace reality and erase it...

By Alain Brossat 

Potemkin becomes a precursor of contemporary inventors of reality, at the crossroads of the sphere of communication and the political scene. In our societies, the real is no longer the given, it is a fabrication, a production... 

By José Ángel Ruiz Jiménez 

In this article I try to explain that, with respect to the war in Ukraine, we are living through a clash of self-interested policies, journalistic narratives and defence doctrines between the West, Russia and Ukraine that have gradually created the conditions for a war with very serious global consequences. I also try to propose some more rational, efficient and human rights-compliant alternatives for managing the conflict... 

By Alain Brossat 

Potemkin becomes a precursor of contemporary inventors of reality, at the crossroads of the sphere of communication and the political scene. In our societies, the real is no longer the given, it is a fabrication, a production... 

By Alain Brossat 

The more contemporary democracy advances in age, enters its late age, the more it resembles a Potemkin village. By restoring colors to the image of the Potemkin village, it would be a question of trying to break the conceptual lock that locks the reforming critique of contemporary democracy... 

By Alain Brossat

In The Crisis of Culture, Hannah Arendt draws our attention to the vulnerability of factual truths, subject to the constant pressure of opinion and the type of truth regime that prevails in it – that of the multiple and the changeable… 

By Alain Brossat

After the decisive victories of Stalingrad on the Russian front, Al Alamein in the desert war, in North Africa, and Guadalcanal and Midway on the Asian front, in the Pacific war, the Allies had good reasons for banking on a defeat of the Axis and to consider a future in the colors of victory...

By Alain Brossat

It was towards the end of the 1960s that the Chinese nationalist party—the Kuomintang, defeated in the civil war, having withdrawn to the island of Formosa (Taiwan) over which it exercised its sovereignty in the most despotic mode—lost all hope of regaining possession of mainland China by force...

By Alain Brossat

In the past two years we have seen countless alarming headlines about the repeated sorties by Chinese military aircraft that worry Taiwan. However, only a small number of such articles have stopped to explain that those flights took place over the Taiwanese “Air Defence Identification Zone” (ADIZ), while it is almost impossible to find publications that have make the effort to explain what this involves...

By Alain Brossat

It is understandable that the precipitous withdrawal of the United States from the Afghan quagmire produced on the Taiwanese ruling elites, engulfed in their mentality of protégées of the big brother from across the Pacific, the effect of an icy shower. Their eagerness to repeat over and over again that the respective situations of the two countries, Afghanistan and Taiwan, could not be compared...

By Alain Brossat

In a context of rampant war of the worlds, where the desires to cross swords are hidden less and less, words, certain words, tend to become weapons. In order to prepare them for this use, they should be subjected to reprocessing so that they become operational on the battlefield. The engineers and mercenaries of the new cold war are working it ardently and are rapidly acquiring expert knowledge in the field...

By Alain Brossat

Can one both drive unrelenting agitation around the motive of the "cultural genocide" in Xinjiang and play with the idea of a "disinicization" of Taiwan?...

By Alain Brossat

政治宣傳效果弔詭，本來想令我們警覺，反而就把我們麻醉。當有人很多年來都不停告訴你，你的鄰居、你旁邊的敵人快要侵略你，他很可能明天早上就會這樣做了，這種訊息無論多麼像警鐘也好，你聽了那麼多年，最後也會習慣，繼續平常過活，不會花功夫找人搭建一個屬於你自己和家人的防核武避難所……